Whether it's at the Tonys, the Oscars, or, for God's sake, the Globes, where these four breakout talents may be getting snubbed, but at least they're looking good in the process

Derek Cianfrance, 36

Derek Cianfrance, 36

Writer, director

It took twelve years, sixty-something drafts, and 1,224 sketched-out storyboards for this writer-director to get his second film, Blue Valentine, off the ground and into the run-down art-house theater near you. As festivalgoers across the country have learned since it premiered at Sundance earlier this year, this quiet drama about a man (Ryan Gosling) and woman (Michelle Williams) who fall in love and fall apart is the most authentic depiction of a shitty marriage in recent memory. All Cianfrance's waiting, and his knack for capturing and conveying the sad details of life as it slowly comes undone, is finally paying off.

Alex Timbers, 32

Alex Timbers, 32

Writer, director

It's been a good long while since a new Broadway show really mattered in the ebb and flow of pop culture. But this year, there are two of them, and as writer and director of the rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and director of The Pee-Wee Herman Show, Alex Timbers is behind both. The only thing they have in common is the sly, subversive wit Timbers has sharpened over the years as artistic director of Les Freres Corbusier, the theater group from which Jackson (and other absurdist works of historical revisionism like Hoover and A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant) first sprung. Timbers offers history lessons for people who don't really like history and theatrical experiences for people who don't really like theater, and that he manages to entertain everyone is all the more remarkable.